US military said soldiers on Tuesday opened fire on a car as it approached a checkpoint in northern Iraq, killing two civilians in the vehicle's front seats. Six children were in the backseat.

US troops trying to stop the car used hand signals and fired warning shots before firing at the car, killing the driver and front seat passenger, a military statement said on Wednesday.

The shooting occurred in the city of Tal Afar, about 60km west of Mosul.

“The Army’s translator later told me that this was a Turkoman family and that the teenaged girl kept shouting, ‘Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home!’”

Published on Friday, January 28, 2005 by the National Catholic ReporterWhat the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Dayby Joan Chittister

Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

Her white clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered.

The blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.

A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well.

A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the car when the car door opens, the pictures show.

In another, a soldier decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers, apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent's blood.

No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this picture.

No joy of liberty underlies the terror on these faces here.

I found myself closing my eyes over and over again as I stared at the story, maybe to crush the tears forming there, maybe in the hope that the whole scene would simply disappear.

I watched, while Inauguration Day dawned across the Atlantic, as the Irish up and down the aisle on the train from Killarney to Dublin, narrowed their eyes at the picture, shook their heads silently and slowly over it, and then sat back heavily in their seats, too stunned into reality to go back to business as usual  the real estate section, the sports section, the life-style section of the paper.

But no, like the photo of a naked little girl bathed in napalm and running down a road in Vietnam served to crystallize the situation there for the rest of the world, I knew that this picture of a screaming, angry, helpless, orphaned child could do the same.

The soldiers standing in the dusk had called "halt," the story said, but no one did.

Maybe the soldiers' accents were bad.

Maybe the car motor was unduly noisy.

Maybe the children were laughing loudly  the way children do on family trips.

Whatever the case, the car did not stop, the soldiers shot with deadly accuracy, seven lives changed in an instant: two died in body, five died in soul.

BBC news announced that the picture was spreading across Europe like a brushfire that morning, featured from one major newspaper to another, served with coffee and Danish from kitchen table to kitchen table in one country after another.

I watched, while Inauguration Day dawned across the Atlantic, as the Irish up and down the aisle on the train from Killarney to Dublin, narrowed their eyes at the picture, shook their heads silently and slowly over it, and then sat back heavily in their seats, too stunned into reality to go back to business as usual  the real estate section, the sports section, the life-style section of the paper.

Here was the other side of the inauguration story.

No military bands played for this one.

No bulletproof viewing stands could stop the impact of this insight into the glory of force.

And if it is printed in the United States, will it also cross the country like wildfire and would people hear the unwritten story under it?

There are 54 million people in Iraq.

Over half of them are under the age of 15.

Of the over 100,000 civilians dead in this war, then, over half of them are children.

We are killing children.

The children are our enemy.

And we are defeating them.

"I'll tell you why I voted for George Bush," a friend of mine said.

"I voted for George Bush because he had the courage to do what Al Gore and John Kerry would never have done."

I've been thinking about that one.

Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Sadam Hussein is still alive. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is still alive. Baghdad, Mosul and Fallujah are burning.

But my government has the courage to kill children or their parents. And I'm supposed to be impressed.

That's an unfair assessment, of course. A lot of young soldiers have died, too. A lot of weekend soldiers are maimed for life. A lot of our kids went into the military only to get a college education and are now shattered in soul by what they had to do to other bodies.

A lot of adult civilians have been blasted out of their homes and their neighborhoods and their cars.

More and more every day.

According to U.N. Development Fund for Women, 15 percent of wartime casualties in World War I were civilians.

In World War II, 65 percent were civilians.

By the mid '90s, over 75 percent of wartime casualties were civilians.

In Iraq, for every dead U.S. soldier, there are 14 other deaths, 93 percent of them are civilian.

But those things happen in war, the story says.

It's all for a greater good, we have to remember.

It's all to free them.

It's all being done to spread "liberty."

From where I stand, the only question now is who or what will free us from the 21st century's new definition of bravery.

Who will free us from the notion that killing children or their civilian parents takes courage?

A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Sister Joan is a best-selling author and well-known international lecturer. She is founder and executive director of Benetvision: A Resource and Research Center for Contemporary Spirituality, and past president of the Conference of American Benedictine Prioresses and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Sister Joan has been recognized by universities and national organizations for her work for justice, peace and equality for women in the Church and society. She is an active member of the International Peace Council.

And then, perhaps less than a second later, a cacophony of fire, shots rattling off in a chaotic overlapping din.

The car entered the intersection on its momentum and still shots were penetrating it and slicing it.

Finally the shooting stopped, the car drifted listlessly, clearly no longer being steered, and came to a rest on a kerb.

Soldiers began to approach it warily. The sound of children crying came from the car.

I walked up to the car and a teenaged girl with her head covered emerged from the back, wailing and gesturing wildly.

After her came a boy, tumbling on to the ground from the seat, already leaving a pool of blood.

"Civilians!" someone shouted, and soldiers ran up.

More children  it ended up being six all told  started emerging, crying, their faces mottled with blood in long streaks.

The troops carried them all off to a nearby sidewalk.

It was by now almost completely dark.

There, working only by lights mounted on ends of their rifles, an Army medic began assessing the children’s injuries, running his hands up and down their bodies, looking for wounds.

Incredibly, the only injuries were to a girl who suffered a cut hand and a boy with a superficial gash in the small of his back that was bleeding heavily but was not life-threatening.

The medic immediately began to bind it, while the boy crouched against a wall.

From the pavement I could see into the bullet-mottled windshield more clearly, the driver of the car, a man, was penetrated by so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured.

A woman also lay dead in the front, still covered in her Muslim clothing and harder to see.

Meanwhile, the children continued to wail and scream, huddled against a wall, sandwiched between soldiers either binding their wounds or trying to comfort them.

The Army’s translator later told me that this was a Turkoman family and that the teenaged girl kept shouting, "Why did they shoot us? We have no weapons! We were just going home!"

After a delay in getting the armoured vehicles lined up and ready, the convoy moved to the main Tal Afar hospital.

The young children were carried in by soldiers and by their teenaged sister.

Only the boy with the gash on his back needed any further medical attention, and the Army medic and an Iraqi doctor quickly chatted over his prognosis, deciding that his wound would be easily repaired.

The Army told me that it would probably launch a full investigation.

Chris Hondros is a photographer with Getty Images and is embedded with US troops

Sitting there in that darkness listening to the briefing on how we were to execute the mission, I let my mind wander from the briefing and said a prayer.

"Just one more day God, let me live one more day and we will go from there..."

It was the same prayer I said every day because every day I did the same thing.

I left the base. With a small team I would go out each day on different missions. I was their translator.

You could see the hate in their eyes

There were different people to meet each day. There were some who would kill you if they could. They would look at you and you could see the hate in their eyes.

I also met with people who would have given me everything they owned.

People, that were so thankful to us because we had rid them of Saddam.

Well, this day was not really much different from all those other days so far.

After the briefing we all got into our assigned seats and convoyed out to the raid site.

I was to go in directly after the military police that would clear the building.

The raid began without a hitch.

Inside one of the courtyards of one of the houses, talking to an Iraqi woman checking to see if her story correlated with what the detained men had said), I heard gunfire.

It was automatic gunfire.

His was the weapon I had heard

Ducking next to the stone wall I yelled at the woman to get inside her house, and when the gunfire stopped I peeked my head around the front gate.

I saw a soldier amongst the others who was pulling rear security by our vehicles. This soldier I saw was still aiming his M249 (a fully automatic belt fed machine gun) at a black truck off in the distance. His was the weapon I had heard.

I ran up near his position and overheard the Captain in charge of the raid asking what had happened and why had this soldier opened fire.

The soldier kept his weapon aimed and answered that he was sure he had seen a man holding an AK-47 in the back of the black truck.

I was amongst the four (along with the soldier who had fired on the black truck) who had been selected to go and see what was up with that truck.

They were carrying a body

We were out of breath when we got to the gun-truck nearest to the black civilian truck(a gun-truck is a HUMMWV or sometimes called a Hummer by civilians, with a .50 caliber machine gun on its roof).

There was a group of four Iraqis walking towards us from the black truck.

They were carrying a body.

When I saw this I ran forward and began to speak (in Arabic) to the man holding the body but I couldn’t say a word.

There right in front of me in the arms of one of the men I saw a small boy (no more than 3 years old).

His head was cocked back at the wrong angle and there was blood.

So much blood. How could all that blood be from that small boy? I heard crying too.

All of the Iraqi men standing there were crying and sobbing and asking me WHY?

Someone behind me started screaming for a medic, it was the young soldier (around my age) who had fired his weapon.

He screamed and screamed for a medic until his voice was hoarse and a medic came just to tell us what I already knew.

Before I left to go back to our base I saw the young soldier who had killed the boy.

His eyes were unfocused and he was just standing there, staring off into the distance.

My hand went to my canteen and I took a drink of water.

That soldier looked so lost, so I offered him a drink from my canteen.

In a hoarse voice he quietly thanked me and then gave me such a thankful look; like I had given him gold.

Go give that family bags of money to shut them up

Later that day those of us who had been selected to go inspect the black truck were filling reports out about what we had witnessed for the investigation.

The Captain who had led the raid entered the room we were in and you could see that he was angry. He said, "Well this is just great!

Now we have to go and give that family bags of money to shut them up..."

I wanted to kill him.

I sat there trembling with my rage.

Some family had just lost their beautiful baby boy and this man, this COMMISSIONED OFFICER in the United States Army is worried about trying to pay off the family’s grief and sorrow.

He must not have been a father, otherwise he would know that money doesn’t even come close... I wanted to use my bare hands to kill him, but instead I just sat there and waited until the investigating officer called me into his office.

I wonder if they are making attacks on us now

To this day I still think about that raid, that family, that boy.

I wonder if they are making attacks on us now. I would be.

If someone took the life of my son or my daughter nothing other than my own death would stop me from killing that person.

I still cry too.

I cry when the memory hits me.

I cry when I think of how very far away I am from my family who needs me.

I am not there just like the boy’s father wasn’t there.

I pray every day for my family’s safety and just that I was with them.

I have served my time, I have my nightmares, I have enough blood on my hands.

My contract with the Army has been involuntarily extended.

I am not asking for medicine to help with the nightmares or for anything else, only that the Army would have held true to the contract I signed and let me be a father, a husband, a daddy again.

http://www.misoldierthoughts.blogspot.com/

Loved oneKilled by U.S. forcesin their homes in Fallujah

Loved oneKilled by U.S. forcesin their homes in Fallujah

(left)

Body of loved one in Falluja.

Many people were killed by US forces in their homes in Fallujah, November 2004

(right)

Body of loved one in Fallujah.

Many people were killed by US forces in their homes in Fallujah, November 2004

Published on Monday, July 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.orgby Sheldon Drobny

Justice O'Connor's decision in Bush v. Gore led to the current Bush administration's execution of war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East that are as egregious as those committed by the Third Reich and other evil governments in human history.

Those people who may be honorable and distinguished in their chosen profession should always make decisions based upon good rather than evil no matter where their nominal allegiances may rest.

Justice O'Connor was quoted to have said something to the affect that she abhorred the thought of Bush losing the 2000 election to Gore.

She was known to have wanted to retire after the 2000 election for same reason she is now retiring.

She wanted to spend more time with her sick husband.

Unfortunately, she tarnished her distinguished career with the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore by going along with the partisan majority of the Court to interfere with a democratic election that she and the majority feared would be lost in an honest recount.

She dishonored herself and the Supreme Court by succumbing to party allegiances and not The Constitution to which she swore to uphold.

And the constitutional argument she and the majority used to justify their decision was the Equal Protection Clause.

The Equal Protection Clause was the ultimate basis for the decision, but the majority essentially admitted (what was obvious in any event) that it was not basing its conclusion on any general view of what equal protection requires.

The decision in Bush v Gore was not dictated by the law in any senseeither the law found through research, or the law as reflected in the kind of intuitive sense that comes from immersion in the legal culture.

The Equal Protection clause is generally used in matters concerning civil rights.

The majority ignored their basic conservative views supporting federalism and states' rights in order to justify their decision.

History will haunt these justices down for their utter lack of justice and the hypocrisy associated with this decision.

There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense.

In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.

The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran.

For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology....

In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'